How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
[Percy Driscoll] was a fairly humane man toward slaves and other animals; he was an exceedingly humane man toward the erring of his own race. Theft he could not abide, and plainly there was a thief in his house. Necessarily the thief must be one of his negroes. (2.27)
Wacky as his logic is, Percy is hardly alone in assuming that one of his slaves is the thief in his house. In the nineteenth century, pro-slavery advocates in the U.S. clung to the belief that blacks were inherently deceitful and threatening to the social order—a myth which conveniently helped to justify their enslavement.
Quote #2
[Roxy] undressed Thomas Becket, stripping him of everything, and put the tow-linen shirt on him. She put his coral necklace on her own child's neck. Then she placed the children side by side, and after earnest inspection she muttered:
'Now who would b'lieve clo'es could do de like o' dat? Dog my cats if it ain't all I kin do to tell t'other fum which, let alone his pappy.' (3.12-13)
It's pretty mind-blowing to think how quickly a person's identity can change thanks to a little wardrobe change. Roxy's disguise of her son shows that identity can be a lot more superficial than we'd like to think.
Quote #3
[Pudd'nhead] complimented [the children's] improvement to her contentment; and as they were without any disguise of jam or other stain, she trembled all the while and was miserably frightened lest at any moment he—
But he didn't. He discovered nothing; and she went home jubilant, and dropped all concern about the matter permanently out of her mind. (3.29)
So Roxy manages to pull off her scheme and deceive everyone about the kids' true identities without giving it a second thought. Are you surprised by her casual attitude?
Quote #4
[Roxy] stuck to her point until she wearied a confession out of him: [Tom] had been prowling about in disguise, stealing small valuables from private houses [. . .] His mother approved of his conduct, and offered to help, but this frightened him. (9.42)
Do we have a problem here? Some readers might worry that the deceptiveness of both Tom and Roxy give black characters a bad name.
Quote #5
[Tom] had a suit of girl's clothes with him in a bundle as a disguise for his raid, and was wearing a suit of his mother's clothing with black gloves and veil. (10.14)
We've got to hand it to Tom: this is one clever disguise. And it makes a culture that defines men and women by differences in their clothing look pretty easily duped and foolish.
Quote #6
Tom forged a bill of sale and sold his mother to an Arkansas cottonplanter for a trifle over six hundred dollars. He did not want to commit this treachery, but luck threw the man in his way, and this saved him the necessity of going up country to hunt up a purchaser [. . . ] the planter insisted that Roxy wouldn't know where she was, at first, and that by the time she found out she would already have become contented. (16.13)
We know Tom isn't exactly the nicest guy on the block. In this case, though, laziness rather than pure evil seems to be at root of his deception of Roxy. And that's kind of a scary thought given how common laziness is.
Quote #7
In almost no time [Tom's] flowing reasonings carried him to the point of even half believing he was doing Roxy a splendid surreptitious service in selling her 'down the river.' [. . .] Yes, the little deception could do no harm, and everything would come out right and pleasant in the end, anyway. (16.13)
You might want to think twice the next time you're about to tell one of those innocent little white lies. Tom's deception shows how deceiving others can easily lead to deceiving one's self about how harmless a lie actually is.
Quote #8
By agreement, the conversation in Roxy's presence was all about the man's 'up-country' farm, and how pleasant a place it was, and how happy the slaves were there; so poor Roxy was entirely deceived [. . .] (16.13)
Roxy isn't the only one deceived into believing that slavery could be a jolly experience. By the end of the nineteenth century when Pudd'nhead was published, lots of Americans looked back fondly to the good old days of slavery in which they imagined blacks to be perfectly content.
Quote #9
[. . .] [Roxy] was not dreaming that her own son could be guilty of treason to a mother who, in voluntarily going into slavery [. . .] was making a sacrifice for him compared with which death would have been a poor and commonplace one. (16.13)
Hmm, it looks like the people who love you can often be the easiest ones to deceive (now don't go getting any ideas about lying to your parents).
Quote #10
[Pudd'nhead] busied himself with another matter, muttering from time to time "Idiot that I was!—nothing but a girl would do me—a man in girl's clothes never occurred to me." (20.28)
Nice save, Pudd'nhead. The fact that someone as sharp as Pudd'nhead was fooled for so long by Tom's disguise suggests how rigid ideas about what men and women are supposed to look like can end up blinding us to important truths.